Conservatives massed in the many tens of thousands this weekend, flooding the capital from towns and cities all over America. The Beltway pundits and blogospheres left, right and center have bickered ever since about the size of the actual protest, missing the forest for the trees.
Many tens of thousands, from near and far and representing millions more, came to D.C. to protest the sexy issue of…government spending. It is the first major protest of this issue. Ever.
From today’s Augusta Chronicle editorial page:
We implore our liberal friends to stop slandering Americans, stop hiding behind the race of the president, and let’s all take a look at the issues together. This problem is not black and white; it’s about the financial solvency of America itself, and the extent of individual freedom we and our descendants will enjoy - or be stripped of.
If this is about race, it’s about a race to save the country from financial ruin. We are already awash in nearly $12 trillion in accumulated debt, the yearly deficit (which is thrown on top of the $12 trillion in debt) is between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, and future promises to retirees in Social Security and Medicare approach $100 trillion.
Whether 100 people showed up or 10 million, it remains empirically true that the federal government is spending too much money. Operating under the idea that a dollar taxed from citizens can be turned into something more simply by being reallocated somewhere else by the government, President Obama has continued the spending habits of his predecessor and tripled the nationa debt in eight months.
Obama’s spending, however, is on overdrive. It’s unsustainable and needs to be reined in. That’s the simple reason thousands gathered on 9/12 this past weekend.
For more photos see Mark Kelly’s flickr page.
Members of Congress have been working frantically to bring the cost of the health care bill below $1 trillion, make it “deficit-neutral,” per the President’s instructions, and meet Blue Dogs’ expectations that it be “paid for.” As the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out, so far they’ve had no such luck.
But the bigger problem is that in focusing on $1 trillion, Congress is missing the forest for the trees.
All the estimates they evaluate are 10-year figures, yet nationalized health insurance, if it passes, will likely be around much longer than that. Longer-term estimates must therefore be examined to determine whether future promised benefits will really be paid for.
Turns out, funds are insufficient to the tune of $9.2 trillion, according to the Joint Economic Committee’s 75-year costs estimate of the House bill.
That’s big, but when you add it to the existing unfunded promises–which exceed $45 trillion–that already exist in Social Security and Medicare, the House health bill makes an already unaffordable and unsustainable budget worse. In fact, the unfunded promises of the health bill are bigger than the Social Security shortfall alone.
Without nationalized health care, the amount of money that would be required from every American, today, to close our current fiscal gap equals $184,000. If $9.2 trillion in new debt is added, that figure would exceed $214,000–an additional $30,000 per person.
Unless you can afford to write a $214,000 check to the government today or want to pass the buck onto future generations, you have to ask yourself: Can America really afford national health care right now?